INPUT DEVICE: GIRLFRIEND(2)

Breath; in, and out. 

 

"The process is fast — not instant, but it starts fast, and then you just have to wait on it."

 

Breathe; in, and out. In, and out. 

 

You're staring at the paint on your living room ceiling. It's not a high ceiling, but from down here it is quite far away. As much as you want to reach your arms up and feel the voiding expanse between how high the white paint is compared to your little arms, you've been told to stay still. So, you stay still. 

 

"Just focus on," Jess puts their free hand on your naked chest, "feeling these move."

Softly, your lungs contract and settle emptily. 

 

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Lonnie asked.

She is looking at you with something in her eyes. Concern, maybe? Hesitation? 

 

Breathe; in...

 

"Yes. I want to do this."

 

...and out. 

 

"Alright then," and Jess injects you. 

 

The sudden shocked shouting from Lonnie at Jess for not doing a countdown, or even a little grace period before sticking you, faded out quickly; not likely because the liquid had already had any sort of substantial effect on you, but probably because you're just prone to zoning out. 

 

The pin prick of the needle being taken out of your arm feels like the umbilical cord being snipped and clipped, or the stem of an apple finally separating under the apples weight. You’re very aware of how alone you are now, and you’re changing. A baby bird having been pushed from the nest. 

 

Damn, this did get heavy fast.

 

Jess’s hand is still on your chest, so you’re not totally alone. On the floor, naked, with a girlfriend on both sides, this is almost the start of something you can only watch after 9PM when the Wi-Fi’s Safe Search function — that none of you know how to turn off — disables for the night. Haha. You're nervous. Her thumb presses the bead your nipple down and you can’t get over how unbelievably far away she feels. Everything is so high up from down here, inside your little body.

 

What's happening inside of you right now is... debatable. Something to do with your blood iron content, type VI collagens, and the radioactive decay of your body’s atomic nuclei to transmute your elemental makeup from tissue to.. well. Metal. With, of course, a few genome edits programmed into the injectable DNA to make you proper robotic. 

 

The syringe held a substance that the three of you had been calling ‘Robot HRT.’ You're transgender and take regular HRT so.. it was supposed to be funny. It didn’t actually affect your hormones too much, but it was a kind of replacement therapy…? Sort of. Research chemicals are nothing to play around with unless you have a minimum of two (2) girlfriends to take care of you in the aftereffects. Hehe. 

 

The first pain that shot through your gut surprised you. You flinched and Jess's hand retracted from your boob. It was sharp and felt like — ow, a second pain.

 

“Ow..” you whine. It’s sharp. A third pain. A fourth.

 

Lonnie starts paying attention to you again, moving away from sorting out the needle disposal. She shuffles towards you on her knees, picking her fingernails. 

 

“Thrash? Are you okay? What do you feel?”

 

Burning. Pain. Nettles. Webbing pains weaving through you. You grab her hand and clench. Fuck!

 

“Thrasher?” She’s afraid.

 

“PAIN!” 

 

Jess told you not to arch your back, so you don't, you lay still and good, arching your neck instead and digging the back of your skull into the floor. 

It's impossible to hold in your shouting; all over your body, blooming razors of pain are dragging across you, within you. Shards of white-hot pain split down your limbs, cutting through your chest, clattering on the bones of your joints you’re trying SO HARD not to move. 

 

Your body is positively humming with pain; it traces your veins, using your biology like a map to slice across, and GOD IT HURTS. It drags down your flesh, separating the twine of your muscles and skimming down your bones. Tears somehow manage to escape your eyes, screwed shut painfully tight from pain — this was a lot more than you expected. This is A LOT. 

Your face is pale and sweat is peeling down the rivets of your body, glistening you underneath the overhead light. 

It catches you off guard at first, but as the claws of razor start slashing the bottom of your spine you SCREAM

SCREAM

SCREAM

SCREAM

SCREAM

SCREAM

SCREAM

 

SCREAM

 

SCREAM

 

SCREAM

 

SCREAM

 

SCREAM

 

SCREAM

 

The sound is impossible loud inside of your ear and your back arches like a snapped elastic. Red, bleeding pain shoots up the whole of your entirety, your core scaffold, your spine. You feel like you’ve been slit open and the only thing holding your guts from sloughing out of your ass-to-nape gash is this unbearable arching clench you're holding.

 

Breathe; in...

 

"AAUUUGH..." Every muscle in your body is rock-hard and aching something fierce. Like electricity burning through you, barbed wire being fed into your veins and pulled back out whichever hole is closest. You're certain that you're dying, that something has gone wrong, that your veins are desperately trying to expel whatever dark-web filth you've intravenously shot into them. 

 

There is something inside of your body tearing you apart- you can't stop screaming. There are beetles with razor thin wings flying through the cavities in your gut. You're being fucking vivisected from the inside out. You can't angle your vertebrae any further back unless you want to start ripping soft tissue.

 

"Let go!" Lonnie is shouting at you. Jess has their hand on you again. You are an unstoppable force trapped inside of an immovable object, you are dying, you are in SO MUCH PAIN.

 

It's an impossible feat for you to loosen this pressure. You inch your way towards letting up on holding the reigns for a microsecond, but as soon as they start rappelling back, you grip back on twice as hard; it's like a cramp that's trying to implode your entirety.

 

"Let go!" She shouts, again.

"Let go!" Oh.

"Let go!"

"Let go!"

 

"Let go!"

 

"Let go!"

 

"Let go!"

 

You try, and jerk back.

 

"Let go!"

 

Again, but you jerk.

 

"Let go!"

 

Again. The blaring feedback loop inside your head stops abruptly and your back hits the floor with a dull deadweight thud that you hear clear as day, free of the warped output screams of your girlfriend's voice. All of the knifelike pains inside of your body shift as you drop, and the relief is like a fucking orgasm.

 

All of the shards of glass tearing and shredding you from the inside of your crowded abdomen fall into place like puzzle pieces as you fall, a sea of crystal-clear water at its climax, it is fluid, and smooth, and utterly euphoric. 

 

"Ghnnggh.." Voice broken after such a hoarse scream; you exhale a breath you didn't first know you were holding. A fat bead of sweat tumbles down your forehead, tracing the dip of your temple, before dissolving into your hairline. You shiver; it's nice.

 

"Thrash?" Jess asks. 

 

A guttural throat noise is all you can make for a response. You're breathing heavily, your body feels like it weighs ten tonnes more. It probably is getting heavier, actually. Weird.

 

"That was.. the first part of the process." Jess continues.

You pale at the possibility of going through that again anytime soon.

 

"What?" Lonnie says, concern once again threaded through her voice. Jess shakes her head and pulls a notebook across the floor from behind Lon. A heady heat starts bleeding from the space where pain used to be inside of you, starting from the bottom of your spine and warming up and out into your gut; despite this, you're misted in cooling sweat. 

 

"The forum guy said- uhm," Jess flips the page back and forth. The dark blue ink is scrawled in chicken-scratch and was written so heavily the back of the page looks veined, "Ah, um, there's three steps, and that — that was the worst one!"

 

Some good news at least. The urge to run your finger across the back of that page suddenly fills your mind. You love Jess's handwriting, it calms you, to see such self-contained chaos.

 

"Apparently its, there's three parts. The infection, the bleed, and the.."

 

"The bleed?!" Lonnie shouts, with concern. She has very loud concern lately.

 

"And the expel. His names for them, not anything official. Not that there is anything offici-"

 

"What is the bleed?!"

 

"Ah, umm," Jess begins flitting her fingers back and forth over the page. You feel cold now, like the glass ocean inside of you has cooled. Stiff and naked on the floor like you've been disassembled for cleaning, then reassembled, and now your girlfriends are trying to turn your power back on. Oh gosh, you can't wait. 

"The bleed is the process of the alloy veins — that's the pain you were feeling before, it is literal veins of alloy — releasing enzymes that will exacerbate the process of.. transition. Heavily cushioned by endorphins. Oh, that's a footnote."

 

That manages to calm Lon's poor nerves. The heat inside you spreads, tingling, speckling you from the inside out. 

Lonnie sighs next to you and folds down, resting her head on your bare stomach. She's warm and not covered in sweat, so you appreciate it. Oh fuck, this is the endorphins, isn't it? Damn, it’s nice. 

 

"I'm happy," you comment, "because of the drugs."

 

"Drugs?" Lonnie turns her head, not pulling it up from your tummy.

 

"Endrugphins."

 

"Hehe. I'm not sure if it counts as drugs if your brain just.. makes them for you."

 

You smile and blink slowly at her and she returns the gesture. Lonnie makes a noise and presses her head into your stomach; for a moment you appreciate her pawing, but it doesn't last long. She lifts her head and presses it in again, before sitting up taut and causing Jess to ask her what she's doing.

 

"Feel this!" Her soft hands quickly replace the place where her head was, like a child trying to get the most accurate measurement from the wall-hung height chart. Jess's hands get in on your tum too. Humming at the lovely affection from your partners, you wish you could put a hand on too, but your arm doesn't move. 

 

"Oh, shit! That's cool. That's the alloy vein, that's normal, we shouldn't be pressing on it." 

Lonnie rips her hands away and you feel the smallest breath of coolness bleed into the space where she was. Its more comforting than you'd expect, but that’s probably just by virtue of you being soaked in sweat and burning up a bit. 

 

Breathe; in, and out.

 

Thrumming inside your stomach, you feel like you've just eaten a big meal after a day of fasting in preparation for it; a fullness oozing through you, an egg in the snake's long belly. Jess said you should aim to stay still throughout the entire process of change but all you want to do is curl onto your side and rub your tummy ‘til it puts you to sleep.

 

Breathe; in, and out.

 

The room is warm, and your skin is warmer, but the floor below you is a dull cold. Its silent in the room bar the heavy breaths of your girlfriends beside you; every once in a while, you feel the glittering of cooled air on your flesh, and it sends a shiver through you. Everything is so sensitive all of a sudden. 

 

Breathe; in, and out.

 

Your calm is quite disrupted by Lonnie shrieking.

 

“What?!” Jess sounds annoyed in that way she gets when she's caught off guard. Lon quickly slaps her hands over her mouth, making you flinch at the sound. 

The long, slow hiss of your girlfriend sucking air through her teeth makes you open your eyes carefully. What’s happening?

 

“Oh. That’s.. that's normal Lon. That’s what the bleed looks like, I guess. Did you have to scream?”

 

Past the point of no return; the chrome blossoms upon your skin don’t hurt. They feel like pins and needles ghosting over your body, numb and glittery. They look like smudges of paint getting bigger from the inside, like reflection developing on a glass mirror, like a timelapse of a bruise developing. 

It infects the thinnest parts of flesh first, your fingertips, your toenails, the arch of your ears and ball of your shoulders — crusting you over like paint drying. Your chassis forming. 

 

Almost, just faintly, you could convince yourself it felt like featherlight gloves being pulled up and around your knuckles; the illusion didn't last for long in your mind however, it was getting harder to separate the sensation from your reality — your sensitive flesh was turning into steel alloy. This was not an impermanent facade. 

Patches bleed across your form, replacing you with steel, having deleted what used to be. The first draft has been scrapped; you are an imperfect synergy of flesh and alloy, a beautiful, electroplated figure. You let yourself breath in and find it difficult to do, coarse, tense. 

 

"Hard to breath," you say. It captures the attention of your enraptured girlfriends at once, of whom were staring at your naked form with the furthest thing from arousal in their eyes. 

 

"Don't worry, you won't choke," Jess puts her hand on the expanse of your forehead, bangs pinned back, and the lack of sensation of your skin moving under her palm unsettles you. You fail to move your eyebrows and don't think too hard on why. 

 

"Hurts," you wheeze softly. 

 

"Are you still okay to do this?"

 

Lonnie is crouching over you from your left side. She was nervous about doing this at all, it isn't the rarest bodily modification in the world, but it certainly wasn't anything you saw in your average grocery store, a robot person. Her concern is sweet, but..

 

"What," you exhale and then inhale, "like I can pussy out now?"

It makes her smile. If anything, you know she loves you for your stupidly brash independence. You are the one who asks for extra condiments at restaurants in this relationship. 

 

Jess is smiling beside you, and they start rubbing your thigh gently, soothing. As her hand brushes over you, you can tell where the patches are fruiting on your skin. Her fingers trace the sensitive real flesh, and half of her touch is obscured by the unfeeling metal growing in you.

 

Well.. it's not unfeeling per se, it's more similar to the feeling of your hand going numb. You can feel the pressure of Jess's hand resting on you, and when that pressure moves from your upper thigh to your lower thigh, but there's no actual sensation of her touch. 

 

"You're almost completely grey, now, love," Jess wipes across your thigh and you think about how little you feel it, "you're almost reflective."

 

This makes you smile and your lungs, tensely breathing, swell with pride. It's the clearest euphoria you've ever felt. 

 

It's not the most common thing in the world.. to transition your species. There are more transgender people than transspecies, but it's a big enough phenomenon that you know two local transspecies people impersonally — the only difference is that they go from animal species to another animal species. You don't know what the leopard woman transitioning to a domestic shorthair would say when she next saw you in the instant meal's aisle. 

 

What would she do, seeing your new chrome coating.. this new immutable facet of you, robotic yet un-automated. Becoming a robot has always been something you have entertained.. quite in the same way you figured out you were nonbinary — or maybe, they were the same thing. 

Growing up, you'd build these silly cardboard-box-bots, and insist to anyone who asked that they weren't boys or girls, they were robots, duh. It developed into cardboard suits, to aluminium suits, to... well, this. 

 

The enmeshment of your nonbinary identity and your nonperson identity is vast, they make up the tapestry of your individual, you can't separate the one from the other without unthreading the entire display. 

 

At first, you don't know if this little throwback to your childhood had made you cry, but then the uncomfortable weight on your eyes grows heavier and you cannot blink it away no matter how hard you try, so it's certainly not tears.

You whine high in your throat, blinking rapidly from the unfamiliar feeling of smearing this blurry mess across your eyeballs the more you blink to get it off. It is frightening in the moment.

 

"Jess? Lon?"

 

"We're here," they overlap. You're beginning to cry in spite of the translucent force slathering your eyes and see the warbled figures of your partners silhouettes hunch over you, staring, gasping, before something spills inside your brain and...

 

"Woah! See your pupils dilate!" Jess laughs and sits back.

 

Heat overtakes you; your cheeks flush and your eyes roll back slightly trying to find the safe darkness of your eyelids. Fuckin' endorphins. 

 

"It's like... glass...? Or, or clear slime.." Lonnie is still staring at you through the gaussian blur, and you feel so warm. This shit should be a controlled substance, or you could see yourself getting used to it. 

 

"Gross," your voice cracks and you blink again. 

 

"Keep your eyes open for me," Lonnie presses, but you just can't.

 

"Can't, feels too good."

 

"Are you sleepy?" Jess asks.

 

"Yeah."

 

"Don't go to sleep," Jess's hand brushes over your face lightly, "you've got to be awake for the next process."

 

You groan quite loud and start fluttering your eyes trying to keep them anywhere away from closed for too long... getting your eyes open for a few seconds is the easy part, and you like to think you're helping this goo spread evenly with all of the back-and-forth window-wiper'ing you're doing. You sure hope the goo is supposed to be there. It probably-

 

"F–FUCK!" 

 

Jess jumps a mile and yells at you for scaring them, but you're not listening.

 

"Fuck! My leg, my knee just broke! Holy shit!" You promptly report. Jesus fucking Christ. 

 

Upon opening your eyes to check for the limb you assume has detached from your body, you can see ten times clearer than you could before and it is world-shatteringly disorienting. 

 

"What?!" Lonnie immediately starts fussing over your knee, but you're absolutely mesmerised by your vision.

 

"Oh my god!"

 

Everything you can see is tinged pink and aqua and pastel yellow, like a car has been leaking oil all over your vision. The way your brain used to blur out everything you weren't focussing on has been scrapped and now you can see everything in hyper-detail, all of the time. You scrunch your eyes shut tight and reopen them back to this crisp, detailed reality. 

 

"Thrasher, your knee!" Jess shouts, you scrunch your eyes shut again, ignoring her panic.

 

"It hurts! It's so pretty but it's so fucking raw!"

Every speck of minuscule shadow cast by the grainy paint of your ceiling overwhelms you within seconds. 

 

You have to dig your fingernails into the numb bed of your palms to keep from swinging them up and pressing on your eyes as hard as possible. You're getting overstimulated fast. Jess and Lon are still fussing over your knee when-

 

"OW, FUCK FUCK, OUCH!"

 

"Thrash, what?!" Lonnie's screaming upsets you. Lonnie screaming in fear, out of realisation of what's happening, upsets you even further so.

 

Instead of working it painlessly into the genetic code editors of the substance, the workaround for the rivets in robotic joints and the hardware ports was to allow for barriers to form and then isolate unneeded flesh from the bulk of your body. Dissecting it out of what is left of your skin. 

 

This is the expel.

 

Lonnie screams at your bloodless viscera's expulsion. It's a sharp shock of pain under the joint of your knees, and around your ankles. Your eyes are still screwed shut tight out of fear of this new 1080p vision being too much for you to run and frying you out so soon. Jess — ever the smartest of you three — puts her entire weight onto holding down your forearms just before the caulking-esque discarded flesh is cut out of those limbs, too.

 

The pain is indescribable. How can you describe the experience of your flesh being disconnected from itself inside out, and sloughing down the bloody gashes it has left? You can't.

 

Jess is freaking out and determined to keep your vigorous thrashing contained. Your vision starts getting spotty and infecting the pinks, blues and yellows with a saturated and darker tone. 

 

Everything splits to jet black within an instant; utter silence drowns you. The pain is far away, and you can feel the disgusting slivers of rejected flesh slip down your metal indentations.

You knew it was going to be an ugly process. You agreed to this pain, these raw few hours for a life of completeness hereon out. You were not going to let zoning of take this away from you.

 

So instead, you SCREAM—

"Thrasher!"

THE SOUND DEAFENS YOU BEFORE IT STOPS—

"Thrash!"

THE FEEDBACK LOOP PITCHING INFINITELY HIGHER—

"Thrasher!"

THE PAIN TOPPING UNMEASURABLE SCALES—

"THRASHER!"

 

Jess is above you and your eyes are open far too wide. You scrunch them shut, but you remember manners and prop them open a lash at a time. 

Her eyes are wild, you can see every blood vessel inside them and how they make their unnoticeable twitches; Lonnie is behind her, and she is shaking. 

Nobody says anything for a shallow few moments.

 

"You blacked out," Lonnie whispers.

 

"I did?"

 

"You did," Jess picks up, "but that's okay, that's okay Lonnie."

Jess gets off of you to turn to Lon, who's shaking like an autumn leaf. You feel bad for putting her through this and wish you could hug her which Jess takes care of for you. You lie there for a second, watching them embrace, and think about how you want to join them. You don't say anything for a second, but.

 

"Can I..?"

 

At your speaking they part, and both look at you — then Lonnie looks at Jess, who looks at her notepad.

 

"Well, there's one more thing to do, but yes, you can!" A smile peeling across their cheeks. 

 

You don't even get the time to stretch your fingers before Lonnie is collapsing on your naked body — Jess soon follows, and you feel absolutely delirious with bliss. It's only been, what, an hour or so of needing to stay still and you felt so detached from your girls. This new-born experience of the full body buzz you get from being enveloped in them, your new clean chrome self, it's absolutely idyllic. 

 

Lonnie is crying onto you, and you can feel it in a totally new way than you could before. You can pinpoint the exact place where the smudges of fluid are, the size and temperature, all in disorienting detail. Getting lost in the analytics of this new nugget of data, this droplet of pure information on your skin, is easy. 

 

"How long was I out for?"

 

Jess's head perks up and she looks at you, then at Lonnie, them makes a noise as if she's doing mental maths.

 

"An hour," Lonnie begins while she sits up, "maybe more. We've been getting the last of the expel.. out of you."

 

She gestures behind herself, and you feel sick staring at the visceral display. 

All over the floor, there's a thin webby spattering of your blood. The fake 'biohazard waste' paper bin from your shared desk has been repurposed to hold — nothing secret as one of them is limply hanging on the rim — the discarded strings of flesh your new structure deemed unnecessary. The fingernails of your nervous girlfriend have an arch of bloody dirt underneath them, and you feel guilty. 

 

"I'm sorry," you begin to break down and apologise for what you've put them through, but before you can Jess opens her mouth to talk — but Lonnie jumps in before her.

 

"Do not say sorry! I'm, I'm squeamish, sure, but you're so beautiful now, you're going to be so happy, Thrash. I.."

 

Both of you look expectantly at her.

 

"I.. need to go wash my hands."

 

This makes Jess laugh abruptly and you love their laugh. Lonnie pushes off the floor and hurries to the bathroom and Jess is still laughing.

 

"Oh, poor Lon." 

 

"Did she handle it okay?"

 

"She swallowed two mouthfuls of vomit." 

 

"Guh. That's gross. Poor girl."

 

"Poor girl indeed," Jess leans across you to poke the escapee flesh-strip into the bin, "and so are you. Uh, wait, poor bot."

 

"Hm? Me?"

 

"Your body has pretty much fully changed by now, but there are still some bits of flesh that we couldn't get out."

 

You barely hear the rest of the sentence. Fully changed? You're a robot? It's done? You blink and it's fantastically automated. A totally evenly spaced, quickly paced blinding. 

 

"Can I see?"

 

"Well, they're on your chest, neck.."

 

You cut her off quickly.

"No, my new body!"

 

She laughs exasperatedly, charmed by your habit of cherry-picking things to listen to and things to ignore, most likely.

 

"Well, I guess you could, but," and she holds your shoulders to stop you from jumping the proverbial gun, "we should get the extra expel out first. We don't want to get carried away and let it get smelly inside of you — and then, you can spend as long as you want in the mirror."

 

This seems like a good trade-off. You readjust yourself and try to sit comfortably, sitting on the floor.

You cannot wait to see your new body. You have to wait but you are absolutely teeming with excitement. It has happened!! You're a robot, wow, it doesn't feel real. 

 

"Thrash?"

 

"Hm?"

 

Jess is handing a pair of tweezers to you. You take them to avoid making them think you weren't paying attention. 

 

"Um, I need those, I'm going to pull out your neck flesh first."

 

Social failure! You hand them to Jess and loll your head back to give her access to your neck. 

She sighs in a chuckle and gets closer to your neck, hot breath on your new skin, probably fogging you up. Oh god. 

 

"Okay — I'm going to grab onto it, and I want you to move your head from here," her hand pushes your head a bit more away from her, "to me."

 

"I can do that."

 

"Alright then," and she goes for it. Typical impatient Jess. 

 

You hold your breath as hard as you can and scrunch your eyes as you jerk your head back to her, but to your utter surprise and insurmountable relief, it doesn't hurt at all. 

 

"That didn't hurt at all! I couldn't feel it!" 

 

Jess slips the worm of skin into the paper waste bin and smiles at you. 

"Good! That probably means you're actually fully transmuted. Awesome!"

 

"So awesome!"

You are so happy! Slipping your fingertip into the gap where your head joins onto your neck, you remark at the experience. You really didn't feel it. Literally an eight-inch long, ten-millimetre thick strip of your own flesh, slid out from the rivets of your joints, and you couldn't feel it anymore than you could feel Jess's fingers touching the tweezers. Fucking remarkable.

 

"Do you want to pull some?" Jess asks. Oh man. 

You hesitate before answering, considering how well you could handle pulling out of your new body, your old body. 

 

"Maybe. Where could I...?" 

 

Jess's hand traces down your still-nude form to the side of your right thigh. You lean over and look at your hip and — sure enough — there is a smooth chrome flat with two small rectangles of pale, furred flesh. 

 

"Damn," you comment.

 

"Gross," Jess reacts.

 

"All you really have to do is.." she takes to tweezers to your thigh, and you start breathing a little heavier. 

Their fingers readjust the tweezers and slide a pointed edge into the gap between your old flesh and your new flesh. A paradigm shift of being, peeled apart by the tools your girlfriend wields. Hot.

 

"Slide it in."

 

The tweezer points come together to pinch the edge of the flesh stuck in you still; this miscarriage of a body.

 

"Pinch them, and..."

 

It caught you off guard so much so that you flinch when she stabs the tweezers into the flesh lump. You can't feel any of the pain, but the pressure and shock was anything but lost on you. 

 

"On these USB ones, I have to stab into the flesh to get a strong enough grip to pull 'em out. Otherwise it just gets.. messy."

 

"USB?"

 

"Yeah you've got," she wrenches the orphaned flesh out of your- well. Your hole; and it is as satisfying as plucking out a gob of earwax, "you've USB's, you've got jacks, you've got a disc tray, I'm sure you've got a vent, too."

 

"Like Among Us.."

 

A success, you make her snort. 

 

"Yeah, not like Among Us, but you keep dreaming. Wanna do the next one?"

You take a moment to think on it, but eventually land on no.

 

"I want you to do them, I think it might make me sick to stab into what.. what looks like my flesh, and is in the same place as my flesh, but isn't.. anymore."

 

Jess looks at you for a moment, clearly thinking about something, and nods. They move onto the other rectangle and you look away. 

 

In the other room, Lonnie is using the tap. You can hear her creaking on the floorboards, and you can hear the pipes shake lightly as the water rushes through them — you seem more like a vampire with these enhanced senses than a robot. You think to yourself that you hope she's okay, and you didn't make her too sick. 

 

It's almost like the guilt you felt when you came out as nonbinary, and so many people you loved had trouble calling you this new name and these new pronouns; except, now, it's not just some new words to use, it's an entire new body. A new lifestyle. It's like your father mourning his 'mini-me' son, except now everybody in your life will now mourn your past organic body. 

 

Jess tugs the flesh out of you and it snaps you out of your thoughts. 

 

You look over to the rectangular strip of flesh she’s holding, and you’re slightly disappointed to find that it is not as comically flesh-marbled as a slice of steak. Jess holds it up for you to look at, and you’re enraptured. Theres a thin layer of what you’d describe as ‘skin-coloured’ skin, a thick strip of white, and yellow bubbly mess all below it. It makes you a bit sick to look at; it’s easy to brush off the view of  fleshy bloody strips as special movie effects, but now you can actually see the bisected segments of what used to be your body.. you can’t convince yourself they’re not real.

 

“That’s.. fucking grody,” you say, and it makes Jess laugh.

 

“You dont want to see how we had to get out the stuck ones. Drying fat tissue gets sticky.”

 

Pretending to not hear her, you sit up straighter. The small of your back is surprisingly flexible for metal, and you bend back as far as you can. 

It’s a new sort of shock when you sit back up and a ‘clang’ rings out from inside of you. 

 

“Woah, what was that. Have I broke it.” You are.. worried.

 

“No,” Jess grabs her notebook again, “here, um.. Your diaphragm is still intact, just.. poly-carbo-nate now,” she struggles through sounding it out.

 

“I still have my organs?!”

 

“Yeah, apparently, um, wait,” she starts flipping through the pages again. Jess never was the best note-taker, just writing things down on a page with no organisational tactics whatsoever. Eventually she does find what she’s looking for though.

 

“Ah, here! The forums guy doesnt know exactly what’s going on inside but you do still have functioning organic organs, its just that they’ve been isolated, some have been.. destroyed… and some have been improved! Oh, that’s good then. Um, your heart and stomach have been cybernetically improved, diaphragm has been converted, lungs have been improved, liver has been destroyed, bladder destroyed, jeez..” 

 

“Damn.”

 

“Damn indeed.”

 

You’re both sitting on the floor and the faint scent of blood is probably irritating Jess more than you. Lonnie is still out of the room and you find yourself briefly wondering where she’s gotten off to before Jess starts doing something. 

 

“You’ve only got this one on your chest now,” they point to your sternum, “do you want to lie back down for it?

 

No, you don’t. You’re sick of lying down and just want to stand up and break in your new body, for god’s sake! You’re out of the operating room with all of your bandages off and you still haven’t seen the results! It’s unbearable to your poor little impatient heart.

You don’t say that though, because that’s very rude to say to someone who’s essentially your surgeon.

 

“No, I’ll just lean.”

 

Pushing your arms behind you, you lay diagonally to give your girlfriend full access to the final flesh stuck in your body. Baring your heart to her, letting her into the exposed remnants of your ribcage.

She takes the tweezers and positions herself over you, and you take the chance to look down at the microvisceral scene taking place on your chest. There are about ten or twelve slits, all with a slice of you previous skin embedded in them. Ugh; you look away again.

 

You loll your head back and just let Jess do her thing. The ceiling is just as coarsely painted as it was the first time you opened your new eyes; you didn’t expect them to have sanded it smooth in the time you were unconscious, but it might be something you do in the future. Who knows!

 

“Are you okay to do this for me?” You ask her, not really expecting an answer.

 

“Well, I’m doing it aren’t I?” There’s a smile in her voice but it still makes you feel a little bad.

 

“Yeah, but, it’s gross.”

 

“Somebody’s got to be the butch in this lesbocule.”

 

“Oh shut up!”

 

That makes them laugh, and Lonnie walks into the room so you bring your head back up to see her.

 

“Lonnie! Are you alright?”

 

She’s holding a mop and bucket and has a disposable face mask on — ready for cleaning? She’s got fresh clothes on and there is some colour in her face renewed. You are happy to see she did not die of fear in the other room!

 

“Hello lovely! You look, oh wow!” She looks genuinely shocked to see you, dropping the mop and bucket down to cup her face and gawk. You feel pretty!

 

“I hope you’re okay, don’t look at me if you can’t handle it!”

 

“I’m fine, I’ve taken paracetamol for the nausea, hehe.”

 

She’s very obviously not looking at Jess’s activities and starts bouncing around the room, pushing things around to clean the floor. To yourself you wonder if your new body can handle any water getting into it.

 

You knew before you started your journey towards this specific type of transition that your lifestyle would have to change in so many ways to accommodate your new body. Eating, drinking, washing, sleeping, all of these things would be changed in ways you wouldn’t be able to have guessed before you found the Robot HRT.

 

You couldn’t eat or drink anymore without dispelling it through your throat — basically you’ll have to vomit up the digested food matter once you’ve absorbed the nutrients. This wasn’t a dealbreaker to you, since you wouldn’t have to account for any damage done to your organic parts like teeth or a throat, but it was still messy business. 

 

You could be washed but you couldn’t be submerged in water for more than an hour, and you need to be allowed to fully drain and dry out inside before you undertake any strenuous activity afterwards as well. This was a point of concern for your surf-crazy girlfriend, but you prefer digging holes on the beach in any case.

 

Sleeping was… no longer necessary. You would be able to sleep, but you’d be conscious and aware of what’s happening around you albeit in timelapse. To actually regain the energy that normal people get from sleeping, you need to charge yourself in an outlet; honestly, this was more of a selling point than any negative! God, you only need to charge yourself once every two or three days as well, you’ll get so much more time.

 

“Alright, done.” Lonnie hands Jess a wet wipe, who subsequently wipes your still-naked chest down.

 

“Done?”

 

“Done!”

 

“Can I go and see?”

 

“Yes!”

 

It takes no time for you to get up on your new feet and start running. Lonnie shouts at you to be careful on the freshly mopped floors but you don’t listen, your paw pads seem to have grip on them? You must not be fully metallic, because you’re flying through this fucking flat.

There’s a mirror on the wall by your front door and as you reach it in short time you are blown away. You are absolutely beautiful, you are everything you’ve imagined.

 

“Oh my god…”

 

This new body of yours, it’s like a silhouette of your last. A beautiful chrome form with soft hues of blue and grey, the light from the window behind bouncing off of you like a disco ball. Your face is the same face, but a steel mask of segmented parts making it up. The hair that is still pinned back on your head is made of what feels like carbon fibre, beautiful layers upon layers of sheet. The cinch of your waist looks to be made of the same material but your abdomen and chest is metal. You have no idea how the hell a simple injection could be so complex but you don’t need to know how, you’re just thankful.

 

Jess was right, too — on your sternum, between the small bumps of your breasts, there is what must be an audio vent as just below it is a CD tray. Good god. You start to inspect your new figure for more surprises.

 

On your right hip, there are two USB ports, as you know. Above them, diagonal slats (on both sides of your waist) which look to be cooling vents. Your audio and CD tray on your chest you’ve already seen, but there is also a small LED above the circular audio vent. You check all over your face and there is nothing, but as you’re moving your hair around you notice a hidden port in the gap between the butt of your palm and your wrist — there’s the charging port it seems. You trail back down your body and find, on the side of your calf, a rivet that insinuates something to be opened.

 

“Hm?”

 

There isn’t any screws holding it in, so you press on it lightly and low-and-behold, the sheet pops out. Inside, there is a long black-and-white cylinder, that you are able to take out. The feeling of a hollow calf is utterly alien, but you’re focusing on the text on the cylinder. 

‘Reserve energy packet. Ten day maximum reservoir,’ and then an LCD number screen showing zero, and an on/off switch. On the bottom of the cylinder, a large charging port like the one hidden in your wrist. 

 

It's a battery. You've got a rechargeable battery stored in your body, one that can store ten days worth of power for your body. You’ve literally got a spare fucking life. Holy shit.

 

You quickly put the cylinder back into its place and reset the shield. This is not something you can buy a replacement for and you do NOT want to dirty it! You could not be happier than you currently are, there is an invisible force of joy swelling inside of you.

 

You give your new body another once over and find two jacks in your knuckles, a fucking aux port on the back of your neck, some cool decorative rivets striping around your limbs, and make the uncomfortable discovery that the lump of your tongue is not actually necessary for talking and if you leave it unmoving your voice comes out in a disorienting monotonous drone. Fun!

 

Before walking back into the living room to your two janitorial girlfriends, you ran to your shared room and grabbed a shirt and pair of boxer shorts to put on… it’s not like you’re embarrassed to be naked infront of your girls, but you don’t want to be unnecessarily crass; plus, you have neighbours! The feeling of clothes on your new smooth, sweat and hairless form is… goood. They feel like blankets on clean shaven out-of-the-shower legs. 

 

They slide onto you easily; you don't have to worry about flesh tugging or squishing or sticking, its all smooth chrome flats. This is as much of a positive in your eyes as the entire extra lifespan you store in your leg. 

Oh god, you've been a robot for less than twelve hours and you're already talking in nonsensical terms and phrases!

 

Upon reentering the living room, Lonnie dropped her wet-wipes and ran to you without the slightest hint of hesitation, hugging you as tight as she possibly could. This woman has the arms of an ox, so you would usually die if she squeezed you like this before, but now? You only hug back joyfully. Another major positive.

 

“Hey,” Jess yells, “don’t leave me out of your love!” They jump up and join in on the hugging. Oh gosh, you’re crying, arent you? You are and it feels good.

 

“You look fucking gorgeous, Thrash. I’m so happy you did this.”

 

Lon’s concern has seemingly melted away, and the simple delivery of this sweet phrase makes you crumble to the floor, again. You and your girlfriends embrace in a little pile on the floor, in the sunny patch of light let in, and you never want to leave this space again.